“If you are going to spend your life …”

by cjdown

From Felix in Exile, 1994

“If you are going to spend your life making objects, or drawings, that have come from within you but that are left outside and that continue to exist, there has to be some part of yourself that fundamentally needs this externalization of the self, needs it psychically. Otherwise there’s no reason to be doing this strange activity. So there’s a question about where that comes from, about what the motivating sense of inadequacy is that it has to buttress itself with so many … either walls of paper in one sense or proofs of existence in another. You have to look back and see, not just empty time but also the pieces of paper on which you can trace back and find a root. It’s like Hansel and Gretel. You feel you’ve got to leave those breadcrumbs if you’re ever to find the way back home – home being who you are or knowing who you are. If you’re an artist, more than anyone else, a biography entails a biography of exhibitions, of works, with a date for every work. A retrospective exhibition is like a root march, if it’s done chronologically. At its heart lies some fundamental insufficiency which ensures that it is not enough for someone to look at you as an artist and say, ‘you are who you are and that’s enough’. You say in response, ‘No, you need to look at the work’. That’s why for a lot of artists, certainly for me, although I am getting better at it, criticism of the work is so annihilating. It’s not just a matter of ‘Oh, they don’t like the picture, that’s a pity’. If the work is not acknowledged, then you don’t exist. It’s felt – I’m sure that anybody who is involved with work that is from them but has to have external form, feels this. So when you ask, ‘Who is the target and who is shouting?’ one will always have to go back to ask those deep questions about that primal lack which makes you feel you exist only after you have made work.”
(William Kentridge, That Which is Not Drawn, 75-76)